£700,000 success makes South Norfolk a 'hotzone' for business, tourism and innovation

South Norfolk Council has won an offer of £700,000 for its bid to fund key capital equipment for Norwich Research Park (NRP) and install wireless broadband projects across the district.

The East of England Development Agency (EEDA) has written to the council confirming its success. The funding offer follows a very tough competitive bidding round which council officers worked on for two months.

The South Norfolk Council bids were sponsored by Shaping the Future, the countywide Economic Development Partnership.

Council leader Vivienne Clifford-Jackson said:

"This is wonderful news for the people of South Norfolk, for keeping jobs, for creating wealth and developing specialist expertise. At a time when Britain is competing with emerging economic giants in Asia and the rest of the world, our ability to fund, develop and attract world class business and science research, is going to prove absolutely essential to our future success as a community.

“Let's not forget the tourism industry either, which is worth £260m pounds to our towns, villages and rural communities - this success will also directly benefit the thousands of visitors who come to South Norfolk every year."

Councillor Jacky Sutton, who leads for the economy at the council said:

"To win, business has to stay competitive and keep up with the best in the world. Businesses should take note - South Norfolk Council is driving forward with business leaders to create a modern, technologically-advanced environment in which they can flourish.

“We are building an enterprise hotzone in this beautiful part of rural Norfolk, and ultimately it's not just business that benefits - it is all of us."

The first project to install wireless broadband hotzones across the district has been offered funding as part of a £303,865 project.

This project will

- provide more than 50 networked wireless access points at key locations across South Norfolk and neighbouring areas to create one cohesive network of hotzones.

- use hotzones to offer extensive tourist information and provide business connectivity to mobile devices right across the area.

- be a beacon for the region in promoting mobile working and promoting rural development, which could be applied across the nation.

- be an innovative information solution to access tourist information relevant to key sites in the Broads Authority area while also making available 150 wireless capable hardware devices across the district to increase accessibility to those who just don't have that hardware.

- add new hotzones in rural locations where there is no fast wireless infrastructure for mobile users and is unlikely to be in the next few years.

- give access to e-learning initiatives across the district, enhancing skills development for local people and businesses.

- provide vital infrastructure for the operation of networked CCTV and other innovative business applications.

- complement, through using compatible technology, the Norfolk County Council-led and EEDA funded, Norwich Internet Mobility Project, providing extensive wireless coverage in the city.

The second project involves buying key capital equipment for Norwich Research Park and the fitting-out of a start-up lab in the Norwich Bio-Incubator.

This includes a large piece of kit that will make the NRP one of the few places in the world where this key research can be undertaken. It has been offered funding as part of a £395,872 project. Crucially, this will also create new businesses which otherwise would have been lost to Norfolk and the district.

It will enable entrepreneurs and existing researchers and practitioners to have access to a range of new, specialised facilities currently unavailable and financially beyond the reach of many businesses, and especially start-ups.

It will:

- Support increased commercialisation of our world-class research base

- Provide increased links between the growing commercial activity, established research base, and the health sectors

This will be achieved by providing two new facilities - a Start-Up Laboratory in the Norwich Bio-Incubator and a state of the art gene analysis machine (ABI 3730xl mutation analyser) in the John Innes Centre Genome Laboratory.

The Start-Up Laboratory will help remove a major bottleneck in the commercialisation of projects from the NRP when work has to move from an academic to a commercial environment.

A number of projects have stalled at this stage because they are still at too earlier stage to be able to raise the significant investment required for their own equipment. The facility will provide these early stage projects with a fully-equipped laboratory where they can rent space until they have grown enough to make the considerable financial investment of buying their own equipment. When they reach this stage they move on, leaving the Start-Up Lab for other new start-ups and projects. The Start-Up Lab will be managed by the Norwich Bio-Incubator.

The gene analyser will be housed in the John Innes Centre Genome Laboratory, in the same building as the Norwich Bio-Incubator. It will give commercial, academic and healthcare scientists access to the latest technology for mutation analysis, a key area in the life sciences.

This shared facility will be operated by experienced staff of the John Innes Centre Genome Laboratory and provide a focal point for increased interactions between scientists from different sectors.

In addition to supporting new and existing companies in the Norwich Bio-Incubator it will also stimulate further academic research securing jobs and leading to new grant applications creating further high quality employment in the region.

All scientists based on the NRP will have access to the facility which will be managed by the John Innes Centre Genome Laboratory.

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